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President
Trump walks to Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House with his
grandchildren Joseph and Arabella Kushner, before departing for Florida
on March 3.: photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post, 3 March 2017

Inside
Trump’s fury: The president rages at leaks, setbacks and accusations:
Philip Rucker, Robert Costa and Ashley Parker, The Washington Post, 5
March 2017

President
Trump spent the weekend at “the winter White House,” Mar-a-Lago, the
secluded Florida castle where he is king. The sun sparkles off the
glistening lawn and warms the russet clay Spanish tiles, and the steaks
are cooked just how he likes them (well done). His daughter Ivanka and
son-in-law Jared Kushner — celebrated as calming influences on the
tempestuous president — joined him. But they were helpless to contain
his fury.

Trump was mad — steaming, raging mad.

Trump’s
young presidency has existed in a perpetual state of chaos. The issue of
Russia has distracted from what was meant to be his most triumphant
moment: his address last Tuesday to a joint session of Congress. And now
his latest unfounded accusation
— that Barack Obama tapped Trump’s phones during last fall’s campaign —
had been denied by the former president and doubted by both allies and
fellow Republicans.

When Trump ran into Christopher Ruddy on the
golf course and later at dinner Saturday, he vented to his friend. “This
will be investigated,” Ruddy recalled Trump telling him. “It will all
come out. I will be proven right.”

“He was pissed,” said Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative media company. “I haven’t seen him this angry.”

President
Trump arrives at the White House after a trip to Newport News, Va., to
visit a new aircraft carrier on March 2: photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington
Post, 2 March 2017

Trump enters week seven of
his presidency the same as the six before it: enmeshed in controversy
while struggling to make good on his campaign promises. At a time when
White House staffers had sought to ride the momentum from Trump’s speech
to Congress and begin advancing its agenda on Capitol Hill, the
administration finds itself beset yet again by disorder and suspicion.

At
the center of the turmoil is an impatient president increasingly
frustrated by his administration’s inability to erase the impression
that his campaign was engaged with Russia, to stem leaks about both
national security matters and internal discord and to implement any
signature achievements.

This account of the
administration’s tumultuous recent days is based on interviews with 17
top White House officials, members of Congress and friends of the
president, many of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly.

Gnawing
at Trump, according to one of his advisers, is the comparison between
his early track record and that of Obama in 2009, when amid the Great
Recession he enacted an economic stimulus bill and other big-ticket
items.

Trump’s team is trying again to reboot this week, with the
president expected to sign a new executive order Monday implementing an
entry ban for some countries after the initial one was blocked in
federal court. The administration also intends to introduce a
legislative plan later in the week to repeal and replace Obama’s
health-care law, officials said.

The rest of Trump’s legislative
plan, from tax reform to infrastructure spending, is effectively on hold
until Congress first tackles the Affordable Care Act.

White House legislative staffers concluded late last
week that the administration was spinning in circles on the health-care
plan, amid mounting criticism from conservatives that the administration
was fumbling.

With Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price
on the road with Vice President Pence, a decision was made: Mick
Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, would become
the point person, though officials insisted Price had not been
sidelined.

On
Friday, Mulvaney convened a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office
Building with top administration officials and senior staff of House and
Senate leaders to hammer out the final details of the proposal to
replace the Affordable Care Act.

“Mulvaney
has been essential in helping us get health care over the finish line,”
said Marc Short, the White House legislative affairs director.

On
Capitol Hill, Price is seen by some Republicans as more knowledgeable
about health-care policy than Mulvaney, given his experience as a
physician and his time as chairman of the House Budget Committee. But
Mulvaney benefits from the close relationships he has forged with
Trump’s top advisers and with the House’s conservative wing.

Trump,
meanwhile, has been feeling besieged, believing that his presidency is
being tormented in ways known and unknown by a group of Obama-aligned
critics, federal bureaucrats and intelligence figures — not to mention
the media, which he has called “the enemy of the American people.”

That
angst over what many in the White House call the “deep state” is
fermenting daily, fueled by rumors and tidbits picked up by Trump allies
within the intelligence community and by unconfirmed allegations that
have been made by right-wing commentators. The “deep state” is a phrase
popular on the right for describing entrenched networks hostile to
Trump.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), an
advocate of improved relations between the United States and Russia,
said he has told friends in the administration that Trump is being
punished for clashing with the hawkish approach toward Russia that is
shared by most Democrats and Republicans.

“Remember what Dwight
Eisenhower told us: There is a military-industrial complex. That complex
still exists and has a lot of power,” he said. “It’s everywhere, and it
doesn’t like how Trump is handling Russia. Over and over again, in
article after article, it rears its head.”

The
president has been seething as he watches round-the-clock cable news
coverage.

Trump recently vented to an associate that Carter Page, a
onetime Trump campaign adviser, keeps appearing on television even
though he and Trump have no significant relationship.

Stories
from Breitbart News, the incendiary conservative website, have been
circulated at the White House’s highest levels in recent days, including
one story where talk-radio host Mark Levin accused the Obama
administration of mounting a “silent coup,” according to several
officials.

Stephen K. Bannon, the White House chief strategist
who once ran Breitbart, has spoken with Trump at length about his view
that the “deep state” is a direct threat to his presidency.

Advisers
pointed to Bannon’s frequent closed-door guidance on the topic and
Trump’s agreement as a fundamental way of understanding the president’s
behavior and his willingness to confront the intelligence community —
and said that when Bannon spoke recently about the deconstruction of the administrative state,”
he was also alluding to his aim of rupturing the intelligence community
and its influence on the U.S. national security and ­foreign policy
consensus.

Bannon’s view is shared by some top Republicans.

“It’s
not paranoia at all when it’s actually happening. It’s leak after leak
after leak from the bureaucrats in the [intelligence community] and
former Obama administration officials — and it’s very real,” said Rep.
Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee. “The White House is absolutely concerned and is trying to
figure out a systemic way to address what’s happening.”

The mood
at the White House on Tuesday night was different altogether — jubilant.
Trump returned from the Capitol shortly before midnight to find his
staff assembled in the residence cheering him. Finally, they all
thought, they had seized control. The president had even laid off
Twitter outbursts — a small victory for a staff often unable to drive a
disciplined message.

“He nailed it, and he knew it,” said Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president.

The
merriment came to a sudden end on Wednesday night, when The Washington
Post first reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions met with the
Russian ambassador despite having said under oath at his Senate
confirmation hearing that he had no contact with the Russians.

Inside
the West Wing, Trump’s top aides were furious with the defenses of
Sessions offered by the Justice Department’s public affairs division and
felt blindsided that Sessions’s aides had not consulted the White House
earlier in the process, according to one senior White House official.

The
next morning, Trump exploded, according to White House officials. He
headed to Newport News, Va., on Thursday for a splashy
commander-in-chief moment. The president would trumpet his plan to grow
military spending aboard
the Navy’s sophisticated new aircraft carrier. But as Trump, sporting a
bomber jacket and Navy cap, rallied sailors and shipbuilders, his
message was overshadowed by Sessions.

Then, a few hours after
Trump had publicly defended his attorney general and said he should not
recuse himself from the Russia probe, Sessions called a news conference
to announce just that — amounting to a public rebuke of the president.

Back
at the White House on Friday morning, Trump summoned his senior aides
into the Oval Office, where he simmered with rage, according to several
White House officials. He upbraided them over Sessions’s decision to
recuse himself, believing that Sessions had succumbed to pressure from
the media and other critics instead of fighting with the full defenses
of the White House.

In a huff, Trump departed for Mar-a-Lago,
taking with him from his inner circle only his daughter and Kushner, who
is a White House senior adviser. His top two aides, Chief of Staff
­Reince Priebus and Bannon, stayed behind in Washington.

As
reporters began to hear about the Oval Office meeting, Priebus
interrupted his Friday afternoon schedule to dedicate more than an hour
to calling reporters off the record to deny that the outburst had
actually happened, according to a senior White House official.

“Every time there’s a palace intrigue story or negative story about Reince, the whole West Wing shuts down,” the official said.

Ultimately,
Priebus was unable to kill the story. He simply delayed the bad news,
as reports of Trump dressing down his staff were published by numerous
outlets Saturday.

Trouble for Trump continued to spiral over the
weekend. Early Saturday, he surprised his staff by firing off four
tweets accusing Obama of a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap his Trump Tower
phones in the run-up to last fall’s election. Trump cited no evidence,
and Obama’s spokesman denied any such wiretap was ordered.

That
night at Mar-a-Lago, Trump had dinner with Sessions, Bannon, Homeland
Security Secretary John F. Kelly and White House senior policy adviser
Stephen Miller, among others. They tried to put Trump in a better mood
by going over their implementation plans for the travel ban, according
to a White House official.

Trump
was brighter Sunday morning as he read several newspapers, pleased that
his allegations against Obama were the dominant story, the official
said.

But he found reason to be mad again: Few Republicans were
defending him on the Sunday political talk shows. Some Trump advisers
and allies were especially disappointed in Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who
two days earlier had hitched a ride down to Florida with Trump on Air
Force One.